Saturday, November 14, 2009

Since I'm not a shareholder (blissfully), I haven't seen yesterday's long-awaited release from the Teilhard gang, but it must've been a doozy. After holding every tiny piece of information tighter than the Kremlin for two years or more, they chose glasnost and opened their books to their shareholders. As if.

Instead, more stonewalling. They are not disbursing any of the vast sums they still want the world to think they squeezed out of the defendants with whom they settled. They are not revealing whether those sums are indeed vast or paltry or somewhere in between. They are basically only saying no comment, go away, we don't have to care in the least what you think.

They could easily have said this two weeks ago. What they finally burped up puts the lie to the management shill claim, made on Vincent McBurney's blog, that they had to be careful to get their release right.

Teilhard management and the friendly board on which management occupies fully half the seats have decided that they hold all the cards, and they're playing those cards close to the vest. Three guesses whose interests they're looking out for first!

I can think of three scenarios that would explain this behavior, and both are bad for shareholders:

They're going to cream as much of the settlement money off the top as they can for the simple purpose of enriching themselves to the greatest degree possible under law.

It's really essential to extracting money from the remaining 200 (ha!) defendants that they keep secret how little their patent settlements were actually worth from the big guys.

They plan to leverage their winnings from the Eastern District of Texas casino to purchase more "undervalued" patents to troll in court.

Anyway, it looks like crumbs and bread ends for the people who financed this whole patent-phishing expedition.